Television Documentary

About

Birth Rites draws powerful comparisons between birth in outback Australia and the icy regions of Canada. These two indigenous cultures have a shared history of dispossession as well as social and health problems. Both countries have routinely evacuated women from their hometowns to birth alone, in far away hospitals.

The Inuit midwives have made breakthrough with the first Inuit controlled Birth Centre in remote Puvirnituq. In Australia the women’s stories expose for the first time the devastating personal and cultural repercussions of this separation policy.

By Jag Films, Produced in association with SBS Independent and Financed with the assistance of the Australian Film Finance Corporation